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Hello,
I just felt like chiming in to give everyone some thoughts on my recent move to IPB. I am a long time webmaster going back to the early 90's. I have had many websites and many message boards. I can still fondly remember my first commercial forum software purchased, ultimate BB. I then moved to vbulletin during the 1.x-2.x transition. I went through many painful issues with vbulletin during my time with them. Most of which are already well documented.
After selling and gifting my past sites and being left website free for two years, i decided to create a small ad-free, not for profit site in August of 2009. After a few months of using phpbb, i had heard so many people clamoring over the latest rendition of IPB. Most people i spoke with insisted that IPB had more features, was more secure and would help increase my search engine pagerank. I checked things over and noticed there was a conversion available for a "painless" phpbb to IPB conversion. IPB was also promoting the fact that they had their own portal that comes standard with the software at no extra cost. I took the plunge and purchased the software for my site.
The install and conversion went smooth at first. However, i quickly began to notice some quirks. First, I will address the portal. It's garbage.
I run a website with zero standard front end sofware. I relied on a portal to give me some resemblance of a main page. I previously used a third party portal created for phpbb to syndicate any news to it along with having a simple links box and some custom boxes that had some html and php. The IPB portal is incapable of even allowing something as simple as create a custom portal block resulting in one of our highlight features of our previous portal to be AWOL. For people who use forum portals for their main page, this is completely unforgivable.
Let's move onto the conversion. I followed all of the directions as it said in the instructions. Forced a recount, cleared cache etc. Everything, at least according to the converter was imported just fine. I checked some of the pages before i relaunched the site using IPB and everything seemed just fine. Just three weeks ago i received a pm on my forum that a number of older threads were appearing blank or had various issues. Let's get into these issues. I found hundreds of older posts that had zero content in them. Luckily all i had to do was hit the edit button and resubmit them and the content would appear. Now that left me with the daunting task of finding all of the weird posts. This took me 6 days alone just to go through my news page and checking threads one by one. I am still going through the other forum sections. I also found a number of posts with odd <!--- w ---> <!--- m ---> <!--- e ---> tags. The converter also utterly failed to convert any [ list ] tags properly. They tend to look something like this [*2pdjh8d] with random numbers and letters in them.There are also posts which have spanish or latin chars also had some odd characters replaced. I have yet to upgrade my forum to the latest 3.13 and 4 because of fear i may lose those posts that i have yet to find. 'd like to thank the IPB for the massive headache they have left me with.
Let's move on to SEO. This seems to be quite a hot debate. I have and can provide more than enough proof that even with their redirect scripts provided in the converter, my google pagerank has suffered due to the move. SEO alone was the reason why i purchased IPB. I wanted to take the site to the next level and begin to rake in users via google, bing, yahoo etc. Nothing could be further from the case now. I hate to sound hardheaded but as far as I'm concerned, there is no SEO in IPB and there's nothing anyone can say that would convince me otherwise.
Features; This is another issue i have some serious problems with. I will say, this facet is of my own fault. I should have read through the feature list or used a demo before purchasing. My site is run as a community. Forum members can submit posts to be moved to the news. Unfortunately, IPB does not allow me to lock individual posts. This essentially allows anyone that has submitted news to edit their posts after we move them. While we are always selective in submitting news by trusted members, this is always something I now need to keep in the back of my head before approving a news submission. IPB also does not have a thread copy feature. I used this at times. It's amazing that such an expensive piece of software does not have a feature that an free "inferior" piece of software has had for a while now.
Security. I never had a security issue with Phpbb. Phpbb openly touts their security record for phpbb3 via secunia and they also have a vbulletin 4 page. Oddly, there's nothing publicly available for IPB on secunia or anywhere on invisionpower.com. While it doesn't bother me, i just find it amusing that there is no concrete security information on IPB.
In the end, i would never recommend IPB for another webmaster regardless of whether he is currently using phpbb or not. I was able to do everything i could hope for with free open source software and some third party addons. Those things cost me nothing; just a little bit more of my time. If you have enough time to spare to install IPB on your own, you can install phpbb and some simple addons to get the same effect. You can then take that money you just saved and buy yourself something nice. If i could go back without losing access to newly created links that are now floating around the net and sparing my forum members another roller coaster ride then i would gladly go back to Phpbb. I would like to thank IPB for wasting my spare time for the last few days in going through my forum to clean up the mess their converter left me.
